“Keep true to the dreams of your youth” is the quote by Friedrich Schiller that encapsulates much of Stephen Jeffrey’s recent artistic endeavours, as it is in our childhood we first come across the objects and ideas that fascinate and preoccupy us. Recently it has been a conscious effort on his part to try to recapture the feelings he first experienced in making art before going to art school and before his adult life as an professional illustrator and designer. It may not therefore be entirely a coincidence he has chosen linocut relief printing, a technique we associate with our school days, as his medium to realise those aims.

Born in 1959 in Scotland into an army family, he moved from posting to posting, from the slums of Glasgow, to oriental Singapore and eventually spending half his childhood growing up in what was then West Germany. A precocious talent, it was always to works of imagination rather than nature he turned to for inspiration, to illustrated books, comics and magazines of the 50s & 60s and to the popular culture of the time as experienced through music, radio, film and television.

It was growing up in those overly optimistic times of the Space Race, the white heat of technology, of the Jetsons and Desperate Dan, the Beatles and the 'Battle of Britain' that shaped his future preoccupations and his aesthetic inclinations. Always he had the sense of being a fortunate observer, a lucky traveller somehow privileged to witness new and fascinating people and places.

In these formative years he also absorbed the different artistic and cultural sensibilities of countries he grew up in. It was through the minimalist design and architecture he saw as a child in the newly rebuilt, post-war Germany that his appreciation of the modernist principles of simplicity and craftsmanship first developed, an attitude towards design he carried on throughout his career and has found it particularly appropriate to the art and craft of printing.